Sassinak (19 page)

"Which means it could carry all sorts of nice things," said Sass, thinking of them. An illicitly armed patrol craft was not a match for the
Zaid-Dayan
, but it could do them damage. If it noticed them.

Huron was frowning at the displays. "Now . . . is this a rendezvous, or an ambush?"

"Rendezvous," said Sassinak quickly. His brows rose.

"You're sure?"

"It's the worse possibility for us: it gives us two ships to follow or engage if they notice us. Besides, little colonies like this don't get visits from unscheduled merchants."

Judging by the passive scans, which produced data hours old, the two ships matched trajectories and traveled toward the colony world together—certainly close enough to use a tight-beam communication band. The
Zaid-Dayan
hung in the system's outer debris, watching with every scanning mode it had. Hour by hour, it became clearer that the destination must be the colony.
They're raiders
, Sassinak thought, and Huron said it aloud, adding, "We ought to blow them out of the system!" For an instant, Sassinak let the old fury rise almost out of control, but she forced the memory of her own childhood back. If they blew these two away, they would know nothing about the powers who hired them, protected them, supplied them. She would not let herself wonder if another Fleet commander had made the same decision about her homeworld's raid.

She shook her head. "We're on surveillance patrol; you know that."

"But, captain—our data's a couple of hours old. If they
are
raiders, they could be hitting that colony any time . . . we have to warn them. We can't let them—" Huron had paled, and she saw a terrible doubt in his eyes.

"Orders." She turned away, not trusting herself to meet his gaze. She had exorcised many demons from her past, in the years since her commissioning: she could dine with admirals and high government officials, make polite conversation with aliens, keep her temper and her wits in nearly all circumstances . . . but deep in her mind she carried the vision of her parents dying, her sister's body sliding into the water, her best friend changed to a shivering, depressed wreck of the lively girl she'd been. She shook her head, forcing herself to concentrate on the scan. Her voice came out clipped and cold; she could see by their reactions that the bridge crew recognized the strain on her. "We
must
find the source of this—we must. If we destroy these vermin, and never find their master, it will go on and on, and more will suffer. We have to watch, and follow—"

"But they never meant us to let a colony be raided! We're—we're supposed to
protect
them—it's in the Charter!" Huron circled until he faced her again. "You've got discretion, in any situation where FSP citizens are directly threatened—"

"Discretion!" Sassinak clamped her jaw on the rest of that, and glared at him. It must have been a strong glare, for he backed a step. In a lower voice, she went on. "Discretion, Huron, is not questioning your commanding officer's orders on the bridge when you don't know what in flaming gas clouds is going on. Discretion is learning to think before you blow your stack—"

"Did you ever think," said Huron, white-lipped and angrier than Sassinak had ever seen him, "that someone might have made this decision when
you
were down there?" He jerked his chin toward the navigation display. She waited a long moment, until the others had decided it would be wise to pay active attention to their own work, and the rigidity went out of Huron's expression.

"Yes," she said very quietly. "Yes, I have. I imagine it haunts that person, if someone actually was there, as this is going to haunt me." At that his face relaxed slightly, the color rising to his cheeks. Before he could speak, Sassinak went on. "You think I don't care? You think I haven't imagined myself—some child the age I was, some innocent girl or boy who's thinking of tomorrow's test in school? You think I don't
remember
, Huron?" She glanced around, seeing that everyone was at least pretending to give them privacy. "You've seen my nightmares, Huron; you know I haven't forgotten."

His face was as red as it had been pale. "I know. I know that, but how
can
you—"

"I want them all." It came out flat, emotionless, but with the power of an impending avalanche . . . as yet no sound, no excitement . . . but inexorable movement accelerating to some dread ending. "I want them all, Huron: the ones who do it because it's fun, the ones who do it because it's profitable, the ones who do it because it's easier than hiring honest labor . . . and above all the ones who do it without thinking about why . . . who just do it because that's how it's done. I want them
all
." She turned to him with a smile that just missed pleasantry to become the toothy grin of the striking predator. "And there's only one way to get them all, and to
that
I commit this ship, and my command, and any other resource . . . including, with all regret, those colonists who will die before we can rescue them—"

"But we're going to try—?"

"Try, hell. I'm going to do it." The silence on the bridge was eloquent; this time when she turned away from Huron he did not follow.

The scans told the pitiable story of the next hours. The colonists, more alert than Myriad's, managed to set off their obsolete missiles, which the illicit patrol craft promptly detonated at a safe distance.

"Now we know they've got an LDsl4, or equivalent," said Huron without emphasis. Sassinak glanced at him but made no comment. They had not met, as usual, after dinner, to talk over the day's work. Huron had explained stiffly that he wanted to review for his next promotion exam, and Sassinak let him go. The ugly thought ran through her mind that a subversive would be just as happy to have the evidence blown to bits. But surely not Huron—from a small colony himself, surely he'd have more sympathy with them . . . and besides, she was sure she knew him better than any psych profile. Just as he knew her.

Meanwhile, having exhausted the planetary defenses, the two raiders dropped shuttles to the surface. Sassinak shivered, remembering the tough, disciplined (if irregular) troops the raiders had landed on her world. The colonists wouldn't stand a chance. She found she was breathing faster, and looked up to find Huron watching her. So were the others, though less obviously; she caught more than one quick sideways glance.

Yet she had to wait. Through the agonizing hours, she stayed on the bridge, pushing aside the food and drink that someone handed her. She had to wait, but she could not relax, eat, drink, even talk, while those innocent people were being killed . . . and captured . . . and tied into links (did
all
slavers use links of eight, she wondered suddenly). The two ships orbited the planet, and when this orbit took them out of LOS, the
Zaid-Dayan
eased closer, its advanced technology allowing minute hops of FTL flight with minimal disturbance to the fields.

Their scan delay was less than a half-hour, and the raiders had shown no sign of noticing their presence in the system. Now they could track the shuttles rising—all to the transport, Sassinak noted—and then descending and rising again. Once more, and then the raiders boosted away from the planet, on a course that brought them within easy range of the
Zaid-Dayan
. Huron only looked at Sass; she shook her head, and caught her weapons officer's eye as well. Hold on, she told the self she imagined lying helpless in the transport's belly. We're here: we're going to come after you. But she knew her thoughts did those children no good at all—and nothing could wipe out the harm already done.

All too quickly the transport and its escort showed that they were preparing to leave the system. Powerful boosters shoved them up through the planet's gravity well—a system cheap and certain, if inelegant. Sassinak wondered if the transport that had carried her had had an escort—or if Fleet activities in the past twenty years or so had had that much effect. Considering the cost of each ship, crew, weaponry . . . if Fleet had made escorts necessary . . . then either the profit margin of slavers should be much narrower, or the slave trade brought even more money than anyone had guessed. And why?

"Commander Sassinak—" This mode of address, perfectly correct but slightly more formal than usual to a ship's captain on board, made it clear to her just how upset her bridge crew were. She glanced at Arly, senior weapons officer, who was pointing at her own display. "We finally got a good readout on their weapons systems . . . that's one more hot ship."

Sassinak welcomed the diversion, and leaned over the display. Since the escort vessel had tampered with its own IFF transmission, they had had to use other detection methods to figure out its class and armament . . . methods which were supposed to be indetectible, although they'd not yet been tested against any but Fleet vessels. Now she'd find out—in the fabric of her own ship if the designers were wrong—just how accurate and indetectible they were.

"Patrol class: 'way too big and too hot for anyone but Fleet to have legally," Arly went on, pointing out the obvious. "Probably modified and refitted from a legal insystem escort or patrol vessel . . . although it might be a pirated hull from something consigned to scrap."

"I hope not," said Sass. "If there's a hole in our scrap and recycling operation, we could find ourselves facing a pirated battle platform—"

"Best fit of hull and structure is to a Vannoy Combine insystem escort. Then if they retrofitted an FTL drive component—" The weapons officer's fingers danced over the controls, and the display split, one vertical half showing a schematic with the changes she proposed. "—and beefed up the interior a good bit—they'd lose crew space, but gain the reinforcement they need to mount
these
." A final flick of the finger, and the armament that the
Zaid-Dayan
's detectors and computer had come up with came up as a list.

"On
that
!?" Sassinak stared at it. A vessel only one third the mass of her own was carrying nearly identical weaponry, with a nice mix of projectile, beam, and explosives.

"Just as well we didn't sail in to take an easy kill," said the weapons officer quietly. Her expression was completely neutral. "Could have been messy."

"It's going to be messy," said Sassinak, just as quietly. "When we catch them."

"We
are
following—" It was not quite a question.

"Oh, yes. And as soon as we have their destination coordinates, we'll be calling in the whole bloody Fleet."

But it was not that easy. The two ships moved away from the planet they'd raided, boosting toward a safe range for FTL flight. Sassinak would like to have checked the planet itself for survivors (unlikely though she knew that to be) and evidence, but she could not risk losing the ships when they left normal space. She waited as the ships built speed, until their own scans must be nearly blind as they approached their insertion velocity. The Ssli had queried twice when she finally gave the order to shift position and pursue. Just before they entered FTL flight, she had a burst sent to Sector HQ by lowlink, explaining what happened to the colony and her plan of pursuit.

Then it was the same blind chase as they had had following the transport in the first place. Sassinak could only imagine how it must seem to the Ssli on whose ability to sense the trace they all depended. Their lives were hostage to the realities of such travel . . . the Ssli concentrated so on the traces of their quarry that it could not warn them of potentially fatal anomalies in their path.

With the Ssli controlling the ship's movement through its computer link, the crew had all too little to do. Sassinak spent some time on the bridge each shift, and much of the rest prowling the ship wondering how she was going to find her subversives—without driving the perfectly loyal and honorable crew up the walls in the process. Dhrossh, their link to their quarry, would not initiate an IFTL link without her direct command, but someone still might loose a message by SOLEC or highlink, not to warn the raiders, but their allies. That would require knowing the coordinates of either a mapped Fleet node or receiving station, but an agent might. She considered sending regular reports to Fleet by the same means, and decided against it. Better to have some conclusion to report, after that disaster at the colony.

Sassinak worked out a duty schedule that involved keeping a Weft on the bridge constantly—at least they could contact her, instantly, if something happened, and they were exceptionally able in reading the minute behaviors of humans. She had to hope that her human crew would not guess her reasons.

She was acutely aware of the crew's reaction to her decision not to engage the raiders before they attacked the colony, or during the attack. She imagined their comments . . . "Is the captain losing it? Has someone bought her off?" Volume 8 of the massive
Rules of Engagement
managed to be lying around the senior officers' wardroom more than once, although she never caught anyone reading the critical article. Some of the crew sided with her, and she heard some of that. "Pretty sharp, figuring out we were outgunned before we'd come in close-scan range," one of the biotechs was saying one day as Sassinak passed quietly along on a routine inspection of the environmental system. "I wouldn't have guessed that the initial readouts were wrong . . . whoever heard of someone fooling with an IFF?" Sassinak smiled grimly: that wasn't a new trick, and bridge crew all knew it. But it was nice to have credit somewhere. Too bad that she discovered a minor leak in the detox input filter line, and had to file a report on the very tech who'd been defending her.

The environmental system was, in fact, a nagging worry. Among the modifications made on station, a rerouting of most of the main lines had meant shifting them into cramped, hard-to-inspect compartments rather than out in the open where inspection was easy. Sassinak remembered her first cruise, and the awkwardness of it. Supposedly the equipment now mounted in midline was worth it, in the protection it gave from enemy surveillance, but if the environmental system failed, they would have a miserable trip back—if they survived. Sassinak glared at the big gray cylinders that lay in recesses originally meant for pipelines. They'd
better
work. In the meantime, either because of the less efficient layout, with its more variable line pressures, or because the line was harder to inspect, minor leaks repeatedly developed in one or another subsystem.